I was thinking about this not long ago because of how many people seem to regard alts as a farming tool and because of the relative lack of benefit to having alts without frontloaded rewards.

Now... Cryptic has generally tried to avoid this kind of thing, for example by making Lobi character bound.

But I was reading up and found that games like LoTRO have per character awards for Turbine points. And instead of cracking down, they actually let people use their alt slots to create farming characters for things like TP and then delete them to reroll and repeat the reward. And what does this do? It adds life to the leveling experience and the game.

So I thought I'd play with this idea:

What if we could cash alts in for dilithium or something else, with higher quality yielding better results, based on time investment activities like the reputation, level, and DOff progress of the alt we're trashing?

I think rather than prohibiting this, maybe the best approach is to make it a design goal.

Next question would be how much they should offer for my alts? An average alt, that only gets "UI gaming" every day twice(15 min./day) creates 40.000 dili and millions of EC per week, not to mention the other stuff that comes around when a Doff system works as it should be..Asking myself how much I want for one..?!

Player 1 who rolls an alt, plays thru the tutorial, and then deletes it gets zip.

Player 2 who rolls an alt, levels it up to 50 and then deletes it maybe gets a consolation prize of some sort that recognizes the time and effort that went into creating it and leveling it up. Rewarding somebody for trying something new, maybe.

Not that I think it's really necessary, and especially not with the goal of farming stuff. It wouldn't kill the game, but I don't see it providing much of a benefit either.

I delete characters I decide I don't like or don't want to play... I've got a couple potentially on the firing lines right now. I don't see why I should get a bag o' loot for dismissing them... it's not a realistic expectation, IMO.

Except for one thing... this game has a lot of per character stuff in the C-Store that's bound to character and lost if you delete them. And there's the added wrinkle of the per-character Fleet ships that you have to buy FSM's to get.

I do believe that people shouldn't have to lose something they paid money for, with no kind of redemption possible. I'd like to see people get their Zen back or an equivalent amount of Dilithium, to spend on another character. Not going to happen either, but that's my opinion.

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Next question would be how much they should offer for my alts? An average alt, that only gets "UI gaming" every day twice(15 min./day) creates 40.000 dili and millions of EC per week, not to mention the other stuff that comes around when a Doff system works as it should be..Asking myself how much I want for one..?!

Well, you'd cash in the alt, not the slot.

Part of why I started the thread is because I'd like to see what the compensation would be.

My inkling is towards something like a wad of refined dilithium (probably less than you'd expect but refined and prorated based on level, commendation progress, and rep), dilithium, and an ultra-rare quality BO of the alt's species.

Except for one thing... this game has a lot of per character stuff in the C-Store that's bound to character and lost if you delete them. And there's the added wrinkle of the per-character Fleet ships that you have to buy FSM's to get.

Good point there. I'd probably also suggest that any lockbox or fleet ships the deleted character earned be "repackaged" as account-bound versions (claimable once again) and placed in the account bank.